Bigoted Moms Tempered

A new day slowly dawns.

National Review Online.
May 11, 2001 8:55 a.m. More by Kopel on
anti-gun groups.

This
Mother's Day, the "Million" Mom group will rally at the state capitols
around the nation to demand new laws restricting the
freedom of gun owners. Unfortunately, an observation by Oliver Wendell
Holmes aptly describes the leadership of the "Million" Mom
organization: "The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the
more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."

The Oxford
English Dictionary defines a bigoted person as one who is "obstinately
and blindly attached to some creed, opinion, or party and intolerant
towards others." Million Mom March National President Mary Leigh Blek
claims, "We need to cry out in one loud voice that we love our
children more than the gun lobby loves its guns."

Blek's comment
is clearly bigoted. She suggests that gun owners do not love children,
even their own. She paints her group as a grassroots effort taking on
the behemoth "gun lobby," a reified "it" rather than a group of
people. In reality, Blek's own anti-gun lobby operates in a way
similar to, say, the National Rifle Association. Yes, the NRA has a
lot of money, but that's because its four million grass-roots members
send in donations. Thus, the NRA is much more of a grassroots
organization than is Blek's group, which attracted less than a hundred
thousand donors.

Blek suggests
that gun owners have some sort of fetishistic "love" for their guns
which causes them to willfully endanger their own children. Again,
reality tells a different story. Millions of American parents own guns
precisely to protect their children from violent criminals.

A gun-control
advocate who wasn't a bigot might say something like, "Both sides of
the gun debate want to protect children; but the pro-gun people are
mistaken for thinking that guns will help. The best way to protect
children is to have more gun control." But instead, the Million Mom
group makes the outrageous accusation that Second Amendment supporters
are so subhuman that they don't care about children's lives — that
they only love inanimate objects. This kind of hate-mongering is the
same charge that anti-Semites have long made about Jews — that Jews
don't have normal human emotion, and that Jews kill children.

Rather than
talk about why she thinks her policies would improve public safety,
Blek demonizes guns and their owners. She fits the definition of
intolerant: "disposed to persecute those who differ."

The Million Mom
group is pushing a program called "ask for safety." The idea is that
the children of non-gun owners aren't supposed to play with the
children of gun owners.

Not too long
ago, some white parents forbade their children to play with children
of different races. These bigoted parents would sometimes use a safety
pretext, claiming that people of other races were dirty or were
crime-prone, or the like.

The MMM's
bigoted opinions about gun owners are no more factual than are bigoted
racial opinions. Seventy million Americans own over 250 million
firearms, and over 99.9 percent do so safely and responsibly. Even
though the Million Moms try to blame law-abiding gun owners for
crimes, in fact the crime rate is driven almost entirely by hard-core
repeat criminals. In terms of accidents, in 1999 there was a total of
96,900 deaths by unintentional injury of all types, and less than one
percent of these deaths, 700, involved a firearm (National Safety
Council). In 1997, 142 children ages 0-14 died of unintentional gun
fire, while 185 died by choking, 676 by burns, 965 by drowning, and
2,900 by car crashes.

But the
statistics tend to obscure the root problem. People who are
irresponsible with guns are also irresponsible with cars, water, and
throat-sized objects. We should want our children to play where they
are monitored by responsible adults. Unfortunately, the Million Moms'
program is not about ensuring careful supervision, it is about
ostracism and exclusion.

At last year's
Mother's Day event in Denver, Jeff Wright was peacefully carrying a
sign expressing his support of the Second Amendment, an action the
First Amendment affirms is his right. One woman wearing a "Million
Mom" T-shirt walked up and spat on him.

In Fort Collins
last August, the "Million" Mom group advertised a "public" meeting, so
a small group of civil arms activists, led by Bob Glass, showed up to
take notes. Million Mom member Cherie Trine described Glass's group to
Boulder Weekly columnist Wayne Laugesen as "a neo-Nazi group
that wants to terrorize the whole community. They're very
anti-Semitic, anti-gay, racist people. They might as well be wearing
KKK caps. They're like the people who hate government and want to bomb
federal buildings." In fact, Glass is a Jew who advocates civil rights
for everyone and denounces acts of violence.

Apparently,
Trine's demonization of Glass and his friends made it easier for her
to strike one of them with a clipboard, resulting in her subsequent
arrest.

Assaults and
other violence by Million Mom members have been documented in other
places, including Philadelphia. In one case the Second Amendment
Sisters found their property destroyed. No one is suggesting that the
Million Mom organization directly advocated the assaults, property
damage, or spitting. But the Million Mom group does foment a climate
of rage and intolerance. And there is no indication that the Million
Mom March has denounced the criminal conduct by its members or taken
steps to remove those members. When the Colorado Million Mom March was
asked what actions were taken concerning Cherie Trine, the
representative replied, "no comment."

The MMM's
opposition to violence, even to gun violence, appears to be rather
selective. Shortly after last-year's rallies, the press revealed that
MMM poster-person Rosie O'Donnell has hired an armed bodyguard for her
child, and the bodyguard wanted to bring his firearm onto school
property.

Also speaking
on the Washington Mall with Ms. O'Donnell last year was Barbara
Graham. Several weeks later, Ms. Graham was arrested for shooting
22-year-old Kikko Smith in the spine, paralyzing him. Graham
incorrectly thought that Smith was connected to the murder of her own
son. When Graham's home was searched pursuant to her arrest, four
handguns were found, including a TEC-9. How did the MMM react to
Graham's arrest for gun violence? The Washington Post reported
that "the women from Million Moms are backing her at her trial."

The jury,
however, convicted her of aggravated assault with intent to kill.

Now imagine
that a speaker at the biggest rally in NRA history was arrested for
shooting an innocent person in a plainly unjustified act of
(misdirected) revenge, just a few weeks after the rally. And suppose
that the NRA "stood by" the shooter who had paralyzed an innocent
young man. You'd hear howls of protests against the NRA from Boston to
Honolulu, and those protests would be justified. NRA memberships would
plummet, and gun rights advocates would desert it, and instead join
gun policy groups which didn't tolerate criminal violence.

Perhaps the
same thing is happening with the MMM. Even at the group's peak, last
Mothers Day, the "Million" Mom rally attracted about one-tenth of a
million people in Washington. Last weekend, the state MMM rally in
Charlotte, North Carolina was supposed to attract thousands, but
instead drew only 125-150.

Nationally, the
MMM has laid off 30 of its 35 paid staff, and has been expelled from
its offices in the San Francisco General Hospital, which were
apparently obtained under false pretenses.

The "Million"
Mom March was the darling of the establishment media last year, but
the election victories that it promised never materialized. Today, the
focus of attention in the gun-control movement is no longer the
mean-spirited "Million" Mom March, but instead the more temperate
Americans for Gun Safety (AGS). In terms of actual policies, AGS
differs hardly at all from the MMM. (Indeed the big donor behind AGS
also gave generously to MMM.) But AGS is pursuing its goals by making
policy arguments, not by denouncing gun-owners as child-killers. For
that reason, the new prominence of AGS, and the decline of MMM,
represent a welcome step forward for tolerance and decency.

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